Ghosts of Themselves
by AkinaTanuki
Summary: In the end, you don't need to be dead to be a ghost.


A/N: _Thaks for deciding to read this. I'm sorry for possible grammar mistakes._

**Ghosts of Themselves**

It's been an awfully long time.

Sometimes he wonders if he should leave and just let everyone be. Although there aren't many people that are left to walk away from. Just the two of them. A little bit too alone in the world, without anyone to take care of but each other. Life has changed over the years.

Like he said, it's been an awfully long time.

Somehow he's always there – sooner or later he finds his way back, stays in the boarding house, sitting near the fireplace most of the time, waiting for her to come down from her room. He notices how she changes – all the little things a normal person wouldn't see, wouldn't even look for. But he watches over her like an overprotective father and he doesn't seem to be able to stop. Even though it would probably be for the best.

Then again – what else should he do with his life?

So he just sits by the fire, without her taking any notice of him. And when she takes her place beside him, he studies her again, looking for any signs that might show she's still caring and brave and naïve like she was before. But he's seen all of that go away – in all the decades he's spent beside her, all alone and - sometimes it seemed to him – forgotten. He reminded himself that that isn't true every time this thought crossed his mind, but it was just the consequence of being dead for far too long. He couldn't really blame himself for that. He should finally make peace with the fact that he did die indeed.

He remembers how she used to run down the stairs in her parents' house. She doesn't do that anymore. Now she walks down with steady steps, like she urges to remain in absolute control over every little move, like she needs to feel the earth underneath her feet. But not because she's scared she won't be able to hold on otherwise and the world will come crashing down on her – she's past that, she isn't the one to get scared anymore. She needs to make these confident steps, wearing this newfound calm, untouched by any worry face, because she likes it. Because she likes the control she has over her own deeds, and because it gives her the impression life is something she has the power to change. She is something she has the power to change. It reminds him of someone he knows very well.

It seems to him she's come to a darker place. A colder one. And he thinks he's right, and he would be devastated about it if it wasn't for the love of this one person that seems to worship her now even more than before – a good eighty years after he met her on an empty road of a godforsaken little town. Leave it to Damon to leave out all the important details of his biography. As his friend he knew more than most people, but he didn't know anything that wasn't shared without a bourbon bottle as a prelude to an atmosphere where they could talk to each other without hiding behind snarky comments and accusations. Even he learned with time how to be more like him, and unlike her he didn't get to spend eight decades near his annoying idiot of a friend – he probably shouldn't be surprised that Elena picked up on some of Damon's traits.

He probably saw some things wrong, he thought. Didn't get something Damon seemed to understand. Because he knew he loved her firm posture she developed and her calm eyes she looked at him with. Maybe they weren't that calm to him. Maybe she wasn't colder in his view.

It was 2034 when she was lying in her bed, her hair sprawled across the white pillow, her hands resting effortlessly beside her body. It was summer, and she was wearing one of those blue blouses with a low cut on the back. This was the common thing to wear for women at that time, and he remembered that well, because Damon – in his ever present jacket, that didn't change much over the years – liked it very much.

He was sitting on the same bed with his back resting against the wall. Of course in his shoes. Like he would care about something like that when it wasn't even his room or his house for that matter – just some place in Chicago they found thanks to Caroline and her uncountable acquaintances. A place that was always full of dust and heavy warm air, with garniture that hasn't been changed since the 90es at least. It was hard to breathe in there, but neither of them wanted to open the window – like it would destroy the strange fleur this place held. So they just sat there, taking a heavy breath in and letting it out, keeping quiet. It was like they were all by themselves in these moments, the other person – one lying motionlessly on the bed like a dead body and the other one sitting right beside it like he was made of marmot – merely a part of the interior, one of the things that seem so obvious you don't even notice them. They were close enough to each other for this feeling to be possible.

You wouldn't even think they were alive if you didn't know they couldn't be dead.

So he sat as still as them until a single sentence that fell from her lips that day made it impossible.

"Maybe hate is purer than fear."

It felt like she stopped time with her words. Stopped time in place it didn't seem to exist at all.

"Maybe hating someone is better than fearing you actually would."

He'll never forget the look of fear and admiration that nestled itself in Damon's eyes – the ones usually filled with a hint of desperation; a pool of agony and painful honesty he keeps hidden from the world most of the time. This pair of eyes – used to giving away every single part of his personality, every little emotion and every cruel feeling – stayed true to themselves, and showed nothing less than the look of a man who was scared to death of something he was waiting and hoping for for decades. A smile tugged on his lips and it made him look like he has finally gone insane.

Elena didn't see it. He doubted she saw anything in that moment, to be honest, but then again he couldn't be sure. It seemed, it was a moment of clarity for her – something that rarely happened to her and something she had to wait years for. She just laid there, with her eyes wide open – and somehow they seemed more confident and less warm than they did before. He asked himself if that meant that her warmth came from her confusion and what that even had to mean if it were true.

Or maybe warmth is something you can hide behind when you are confused.

It was hard for him to understand her, he realized. No matter how easy it seemed, he had to confess his ultimate failure when it came to cracking the inner mechanics of Elena Gilbert. So at some point he just stopped trying and turned his gaze to the only other person he actually gets.

He will let Damon do it. Years of watching them taught him to trust his judgment when it came to Elena. He wanted to slap himself for letting thoughts like these in at first, but he had more than enough time to change his mind. This idiot hasn't changed a bit, but somehow that made it easier to believe in him. Now that he was dead there wasn't much harm in admitting that he saw him as the closest person he had. Nothing he could do wrong now, after all. It took him loads of time to come to that simple statement.

That summer day 2034 he lost his view of Elena as a child of his own he could easily understand, and she found her view of herself.

He would remember this, as he knew would Damon. And he did remember. Because not once did he agree to return to this place again.

Years passed, along with different hairstyles, music and politic situations. They didn't make predictions about what was going to happen next – they just observed and adjusted, like the chameleons that vampires usually were. He himself didn't have much to do on the other side but to train his mind and try to predict what the future had to offer. He was a history teacher after all. But these two lived in the now.

It was 2053 when the cold war made its return and 2054 when Stefan left the New World. He hasn't stepped on American ground since, making some rare efforts to let everyone know where he was at the moment. Damon would joke that he just wanted to escape the horrors of the decade and the possibility of it ruining his hair at first. He never learned to let his brothers hair be, and somehow he doubted he ever would.

It was considered a sign of bad taste if a man in the 50es had short hair, just like it was a bad choice for a woman to let herself show in public with long locks. As painful as it was to watch Elena's long strides fall down on the floor – a reminder of all the time she spent walking this earth – it was a necessary adjustment. She looked awkward, small and almost like she was robbed of something important after that. Alas nothing could compare to Caroline, he had to admit. Damon once called her a hedgehog on meth, which he regretted immensely afterwards. Although, they didn't use meth these days anymore – instead there was something called batrin, or butter. Wherever that came from.

They lost Caroline five years later.

She acted like a social addict since the 30es, but neither Damon nor Elena suspected that something was wrong – until it was too late, and the ever-present blonde suddenly wasn't there anymore. Or maybe she was. But it wasn't for them to know, because Caroline disappeared without saying or explaining anything. They would try to find her, but if she was still alive it was clear she didn't want them to find out. So they lived with this disturbing knowledge that they didn't know anything for sure and probably never would.

"Maybe it was our fault."

"Or maybe it was hers."

"How the hell is this her fault, Damon?" asked Elena, with eyes that seemed to be too big for her small face. There was a flicker of anger in them.

"Sounds just as reasonable as your words of it being our responsibility."

He shrugged off his grey button-up shirt – made of some cheap and rigid material he hated – and hanged it on the chair near him. He stopped making a mess of his hair after he let it grow, so now it run down to his shoulders in one long smooth wave. He turned back to Elena.

"You want to chase her. Don't. It's her own job. She's already running after herself – like a ghost running after its body."

Elena didn't answer, but she did understand.

It looked like she was mourning Caroline, and it looked like she was doing it for the last time in her life. She seemed to try and to put in it her grief for everyone she would lose in future and for everyone she would ever love again. She didn't cry and she didn't scream, but with a shaky voice she would ask the only person who she would allow herself to turn to with a request like that to sing her a song. So she would sit, wrapped in his arms, not feeling any of the warmth of the fireplace in the grand room of the boarding house, listening to songs from the civil war – the ones of brave and dead soldiers; the ones you could hardly find in libraries anymore.

He wouldn't look at that for too long. It wasn't his place to be around, and he knew it. So he went away, and when he returned, Elena was gone again – just like that time in Chicago 2034.

He asked himself if she would even be able to see Caroline as a living person were she to appear again on Elena's now switched off radar – the one that registered every shimmer of hope in every hopeless situation, the one that made her 'Elena' in the eyes of the world. There were just two pair of eyes that did see it differently - the blue ones, that watched her with threatening concern, like they were daring her to break down and try to find herself in an ocean of fearful tears; and the brown ones, that somehow suspected there wasn't anything to find in there. She would stand in front of the mirror, observing herself: her short boyish hair, her grey button-up shirt – almost like the one Damon was wearing, since it was the point of fashion these days to make men and women look as alike as possible, following the zeitgeist of the decade with its radical idea of equality – her skinny black jeans and wedge-heeled shoes. She looked awkward in these clothes. Some women reveled in their man-like behavior, some seemed to take confidence in it, but she just looked punished. She looked in the mirror with eyes that have learned to hate and a face that didn't know what to expect of it. Her big doe eyes were the only part of her that held something that was undeniably her – so she would look in these eyes, sometimes catching the other ones, looking suspiciously like her own. Except for the color.

She recognized herself when she looked in the mirror, but she didn't know what to think about the rest of her – the small skinny girl in these alien clothes, the one that seemed to have lost something. He suspected she buried not only Caroline.

She lost her naiveté, but she hasn't learned how to cope with that loss.

"I think I've lost myself."

"No, Elena, you just don't know what to do with yourself."

It was two years later that Jeremy left too, this time for good and forever. Dying one too many times with a magical ring doesn't necessarily prolong your stay in this world. And this is when all went crashing down, Damon being the first thing of many others that followed. It was the last straw for him after the last few years where he had to stay strong while looking at how lost the person that mattered the most to him was. It did make him feel useless, and he fought two fights at the same time – one by Elena's side and one against himself. Seeing Elena's calmness and put together behavior while they were burying her brother was the end of every fight he was taking part in.

So he snapped, left and run.

They wouldn't see one another for the next three years. He would hide behind bar doors and she – behind the same baggy clothes. He would act like he doesn't care anymore and she would convince herself that there isn't anything she could do. And all the while they probably would know that none of this was true. But she didn't want to make him take back her lost self and he didn't want to see the result of his faults, errors and mistakes.

"You see, there isn't a thing in this world you couldn't possibly destroy. You just have to try hard enough."

He returned to Chicago to celebrate his misery – because he was masochistic and idiotic like that and just had to taint every happy memory this town held. He was on a mission, and his mission consisted of destroying the things he wanted back.

He never succeeded, because he never managed to break 2034.

"And if there is such a thing, it certainly isn't a human being."

He knew he was talking about Elena, but the same thing could have been said about him. About his light steps he was sure he didn't even feel as he walked towards the one apartment he knew he shouldn't stay in. The one that held the memory of someone that found a lost part and couldn't understand or enjoy it.

He raised his hand to knock, stayed silent for a few moments and then left with a blank gaze that didn't say anything to people that didn't know him. The only ones that would care about it were either not near him, or on the other side.

He thought he would try and strangle him were he to really enter the room – not giving a damn about the fact that it was impossible.

He remembered how he spent his days getting wasted every evening, returning every night home not being able to remember afterwards how he got there, how he got anywhere. He would remember how he climbed up the stairs looking down to his feet. Sometimes it looked like he just wanted to stop and not move, stay in the middle of the staircase – but instead he walked on until his feet hit the rug with the word 'Home' imprinted on it. Then he would open the door to the small flat filled with useless stuff even the real owners – that left for whatever important trip they had planned – probably didn't know what to do with, fall down on the couch and sleep tight and well. He would do that every night, and every morning he would leave the apartment not noticing the rug with the word 'Home'.

When the owners returned he thought about making them stay with him. Then he made them leave.

Instead he came to the bar, ordered himself a bottle of bourbon and talked the whole night with a migrant from Russia he didn't know the name of. He was the only soul that heard about the hatred his father felt for him, the only one who knew this hatred was nothing compared to his own. But both he and the old man smiled in these moments. Because one lost the ability to cry and the other didn't understand what his companion was saying.

They never knew what the other was talking about. They just spent the lonely evenings together, reckoning about things that killed them in an attempt to find comfort in the fact that the other person would never get them. Would never get what happened to them. They just had to tell someone who wouldn't judge.

He talked about his self-hatred and a bright smile was the answer. He talked about how every night he returned to an empty flat looking at a dirty old rug with the imprinted word 'Home' – and saw the kind eyes of his silent company.

He would drink until he didn't feel the need to talk anymore.

"I'm heading home", he would say. "You are more than welcome to come with me."

The old man would raise his glass and say goodbye – "goodbye" being one of the few words he knew.

It went on for a long time. He lost count of all the times Damon stepped over this godforsaken rug – it was like crossing a burning bridge he himself set on fire thinking he wouldn't feel the pain of it eating up his flesh, destroying his body, mind and soul.

He has crossed this bridge just as many times as Damon.

"I'll have to leave you, you know. Sooner or later you'll come to this bar and won't find me on my usual spot. Because there is someone I have to hide from and this someone won't leave me alone. He never does. She doesn't either. You're smiling. It's a good thing you are."

They both emptied their glasses.

"I had a friend like you once. We talked like normal people only with a bottle of bourbon as a mediator too. Every time I asked what his excuse for day-drinking was he said life itself was excuse enough since it made him the best friend of a psychopath that he allowed to nag and pester at him every other night. Good times."

The old man however didn't seem to mind as he listened and waited for his turn to explain what happened to his country, why he had to leave everything behind, including his future.

Damon's future was more persistent than that, so he had to run farther and faster as Elena and her image imprinted in his mind followed him everywhere.

He fed during the day, leaving most of the pretty and not so pretty girls alive, breathing and confused as he left them behind in some alley, their blood still on his tongue – their eyes still on his back, looking for answers, trying to understand who he was and what he wanted, and it was the only form of understanding he was getting these days.

This changed fast, and it changed brutally, just as it was expected of Damon. He let the old Russian man behind and moved away, his rationality drifting farther away with every kill he made. He didn't talk anymore and he didn't try to seek comfort, pity and forgiveness. He didn't seem depressed, although it was clear that he was – and who knows if he remembered ever feeling any other way. So he let himself turn the world around him in the same place that lived within him.

He needed the time in Chicago to feel weak – to grant him this wish, allow himself to feel how broken and lost and tired he was. It took strength to hate oneself, and he didn't have it. He didn't have the power to do it. For once the only thing he actually could do was the one he needed.

He was a strong man and he needed to rest.

His life would be a lot easier if he just let himself do what he really wanted to, he thought these days. But he showed unnatural restraint.

What he was doing was typical Damon, and looking at it from the other side, he didn't want to think about it. He watched him so he wouldn't lose track of him, watched him so he would know where to find him although it didn't matter and will never matter again. He watched how he stepped into his self-inflicted insanity with all its blood and booze, and how he hoped – hope being his biggest problem. If he could stop hoping, he may be able to feel better. But he couldn't – so, driven by hope for two hundred years he returned to the boarding house only to leave it a few days later, just before Elena turned up on the doorsteps of a place that should have been cold, lonely and forgotten, but instead held the smell of a recently lit fireplace and the sight of a room that was returned to life.

She walked around the empty house and – he was pretty sure of it – felt the presence and the smell of the one person that still had the urge to come back to this place. There was another one, but if he ever were to return to the boarding house again it wouldn't be because he felt something for the place that was the closest thing to home he had; it would be because of himself and his desire to feel the pain it brought. Elena did return because it was painful to go on without it, not because she wanted that pain. So she poured herself a drink from Damon's stash and sat on the table in the living room, looking at the flames, gripping her glass. Upstairs there was a closet someone she used to know used the same way she did now – to collect all the little hints and markers that would lead her to someone who didn't want to be found. She remembered how she discovered the map of America years ago – these days it looked a bit different – how she read all the notes, looked at all the newspaper articles pinned to it. And she remembered how she wanted to never have seen it.

This time she was the one that put it there, wrote the notes and picked the articles.

It would have been a lot easier if she knew people that could help her. But it wasn't her strong suit to form alliances just because she thought she could use them in future. It wasn't her strong suite to have many friends either. Not anymore anyways. So she waited, looked for a mistake Damon would make, for a body he would leave behind.

The officers of the town were more than happy to help her without asking what this girl wanted – with shoulder-long messy hair always standing up in different directions and a heavy leather jacket that seemed a bit too big for her small frame. And it wasn't because they were smitten by her confident stance, her eyes that didn't hold a trace of doubt or her words that screamed self-reliance, finally letting the world see the core of a strong woman she thought she recognized in herself but never really was – not the way he always knew she could be and waited for her to come out, and not the way she expected she would become. The officers helped her not because of all these complicated reasons but simply because they were compelled.

The jacket was Damon's, he was sure of that. She let her hair grow, not caring how chaotic it looked while she waited for it to become longer – and when the 50es finally ended changed by the 'lucky 60es', she crawled out of her intolerable clothes and became the woman she should have become all these years ago.

A few years ago she looked like an alien, moved like a ghost and actually was one in the lives of people that didn't surround her anymore. She was one even in her own life, and she didn't realize that this was the thing Damon was fighting against. She did get it, but much later.

"When did it happen?" asked a voice she still managed to recognize as Stefan's.

"About a year ago", she answered with this cold calmness Damon ran from. Elena was sitting on a couch in a motel room – a newspaper from yesterday in front of her, with a pencil lying on it. She still haven't read it, haven't even touched it.

He saw the shimmer of anger in her eyes and he could make out the signs of a person who was ready to seek revenge. He saw all the hints of someone who was hiding just underneath the mask that was Elena Gilbert these days and was aching to stand up, step out of her own skin and let the girl she has buried in her own body out. But she didn't.

"Why haven't you told me sooner?"

"You made it clear you wanted a live of your own. I didn't want to take that from you."

"You should have told me."

"Maybe."

Stefan didn't seem to know what he should think of the calm apathy behind her voice, so he didn't answer at first. Nobody said a thing for a painfully long moment, while she hypnotized the old newspaper and listened to the breathing on the other end of the line. She just sat there, looking half-dead and peaceful, in her white shirt that seemed to be made of band-aid – layers over layers of white cotton stripes. The lucky 60es were strange like that. Half of the clothes were made in this style – countless stripes put together, in different colors and different patterns. It was usually something unrecognizable and psychedelic – the last factor being the most important. But she looked something in between a mummy and a wounded sick person in her clothes.

"Listen. You have already managed to do the same for me once", he finally said. "You can do this."

"I was eighteen and brave."

"Aren't you anymore?"

There was a hint of a joke in his voice and a smile of a person who has returned to a beloved place that has changed too much for it not to leave a feeling of betrayal.

And there was a smile on her lips – he believed, it was a promise of a revelation she tried to reach for far too long. He would have suspected that she felt fear in that moment, if it wasn't for the happiness that shined through her eyes for the first time in a very long decade. But then again – maybe she felt both, and maybe it wasn't the happiness that held the bliss of the moment but the dread.

"Do you know what he said before he left the room and closed the door, leaving me alone? He told me that now I had a chance", she didn't give him the opportunity to answer. "It's not about braveness. Not anymore."

"Are you alright?.."

"I have a chance."

With that she ended the call and every bit of her that made her into someone else other than Elena Gilbert – the one that didn't need bravery to hide her fear but could live with fright and strength at the same time. She would try to understand what she meant by saying "braveness is a substitute for strength" later, repeating it like she didn't quite get it, but nonetheless living by this new belief.

People indeed have to be difficult creatures if they need this awful amount of time to figure themselves out, whereas there isn't anything closer to them.

She was scared when she read the articles and she was scared when she returned to the boarding house, finding it too big and too full of memories. And he was sure she was just as scared every time she entered the police office, looking like she had the right to march in there without invitation, making one strong confident step after another – each one of them giving her the control she wanted and the sense of being there and feeling her presence in this world.

She was at peace with her fear. She wasn't with its cause.

It took three years, the annexation of Canada, a peak of one pretty strange art flow called convertionalism and the world on the verge of a nuclear war for them to get together again. Not to mention all the other things that marked the 60es as the 'lucky' decade: the death of the rainforest, the newfound UFO-hysteria that broke out after the Americans and the Chinese landed on Mars, the theft of the Mona Lisa and the end of all oil resources around the world.

Neither of these things were keeping them from sleeping at night – it was them that made them crawl, stumble and suffer, and at the end – scream at each other like their lives depended on it. Which they probably did. He stopped yelling at her not after the first slap across his face and not the second, but after he has realized who is actually standing in front of him.

Because if he managed to remember something after all the times he stepped over dead bodies and the doorstep of his 'Home', it was Elena that looked at him with all the different faces she has ever owned. And none of them looked like the one he saw in that moment.

She wasn't the girl Damon met on an empty road anymore, he thought. She has changed in ways she herself has never expected, because the change would only mean she would lose what was undeniably her. And that was her confusion mistaken for caring, her naïveté taken for granted and her strength replaced by braveness she needed to hold herself together.

He watched her, standing in her leather pants and a black-white t-shirt with an optical illusion sewn to it – dressed it the best traditions of convertionalism that made it its point to draw either illusions or anything else but always in complimentary colors. Although everything was better than that one fall 2047, he assumed – when everywhere you looked there was one of Claude Monet's drawings on someone's clothes.

A long time passed until he managed to understand the expression on Damon's face when he looked at the woman he wanted to live and kill himself for at the same time. It was surprise mixed with disbelief – like she herself was the illusion, like she was a fata morgana, and would disappear because wishes and dreams like these never really come true.

"You told me that I had a chance when you left, and I took it", she said moving a step closer to him, like she was afraid she would scare him away. "Now you take yours."

He was sure he saw the exact moment Damon surrendered his fight. Another fight he shouldn't have fought – or better, the first one he ever started and the one he never managed to end. It was the moment when he clenched his jaw, wiped the disbelief and the nagging questions from his eyes, made himself look more like the Damon that could tame his own demons. And if he didn't get the moment right, the she did. Because she closed the distance between them, threw her arms around his neck and finally let herself cry out all the tears she was holding back. And after a moment, he closed his own arms around her – his fingers ghosting over her back, his eyes, outlined with black eyeliner, fixed on something in the distance only he could see. He didn't know he was looking straight in the eyes of his dead friend.

It was one of the times where he realized he had to leave, knowing that anything that was to follow wasn't for his eyes to see. In the end, he was just a ghost and it wasn't his place to stay.


End file.
